NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8163088" data-attributes="member: 16814">Sure, which is an incoherency -- you have tea and no tea at the same time.  Only, this isn't the zen you think it is.  It's why the concept of literary agency is incoherent -- it's an appearance of agency, not actual agency, just like fiction is an appearance of reality, not reality.  If we're going to talk about actual agency, the kind wielded in play, then any discussion of literary agency is incoherent, because that applies to reifying non-existent things but we're talking about real agency wielded by real people.Yes, because we're not treating any of it as real because we aren't using literary agency.  We're talking about actual agency, by real players, over the fictional aspects of the game which have the reality of being expressed in the group.  The events aren't real, but the expression is.  And that's what we're saying we have agency over -- the expression.  You're still trying to argue that the character has agency, which requires thinking of that character and setting as real to evaluate, but we are not.  Agency is not a literary term.  Literary agency is a reificaiton of the fiction so that it can be evaluated in the lens of agency.  This idea you're proposing that there's a difference in how the term is used is false -- it's used in the exact same manner.  The only difference is that literary agency requires that reification.  And, if that term is unfamiliar, reify means to treat an abstract concept as real and concrete.  To evaluate a character's agency within a fictional setting and situation, we need to treat these things as real and then look to see if agency applies to the reified fiction.  There's not different meanings to agency, there's different conceptual spaces -- one in real life and one where we treat unreal things as if they are real life.  And this is a second incoherency -- these things are not opposed.  There's no less free acting in the setting through your character in any actual play example given in this thread where the player is also using the power to either narrate a thing or impact play through mechanics.  These are not competing.</blockquote>

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